Phoenix by A. James Gregor

Author:A. James Gregor [Gregor, A. James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2017-10-23T00:00:00+00:00

Nationalism, Morality, and the State

In the modern world, only the nation, for Gentile, provided the environment necessary to sustain and foster the full moral realization of personhood—which, for Gentile, constituted the ultimate moral imperative that governed the life of the individual.51 In that sense, Gentile’s conception of nationalism—among the other forms of nationalism that had made their appearance in Italy before the First World War—was theoretically distinctive.

For Gentile, the nation was not an end in itself; it was of instrumental value in the progressive moral fulfillment of self.52 Unlike the standard Italian nationalists of the turn of the twentieth century, Gentile’s nationalism was exclusively moral in emphasis—and the nation, in and of itself, possessed instrumental and not intrinsic value. Unlike some of the nationalists that inhabited turn-of-the-century Italy, Gentile insisted that the nation was not a simple artifact of territory, history, or culture.53 It was the moral ground for the fulfillment of ethical ends.

The nation was not a simple function of a material reality. It was not the product of history, the use of a common language, or the possession of a peculiar culture. All those things contributed to the reality in which the individual human being was born, but that preexistent reality did not engage the individual until that individual chose to morally commit himself or herself to the nation as a moral “community of destiny.”

For Gentile, “a nation is not to be defined in terms of common soil or common life, and the consequent community of traditions and customs, language or religion, etc. All this is only the matter of the nation, not its form; for the nation can only exist where men are conscious of this matter, and accept it in their hearts as the substantial content of the national personality and the proper object of the national will….”54 A nation is a moral and political reality only when it is accepted as such by the conscious decision of its members. It is fully engaged only when individuals recognize in its empirical reality the opportunity of moral fulfillment.

Once a population accedes to that recognition, it creates a “virtual state,” and it is the state, the product of conscious, moral choice, that gives the nation its concrete expression.55 By virtue of the collective decision to declare its unity and independence, a people gives full expression to its political will and thereby establishes itself through a real or virtual state.56

The state is an expression of a determined, historic, collective will.57 It is a people morally conscious of its historicity—of its place within a community of nations and in the history of nations.

It is within that state that the individual pursues moral purpose, and it is that law-governed reality that provides the arena in which the individual attains personhood.58 For Gentile, the state is a “spiritual” or moral substance that constitutes the “form” in which a truly human life unfolds.59 It proscribes and prescribes the acceptable or unacceptable ranges of human behavior; it preserves the legacy of the past within

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